Electronic textual interchange is pivotal to businesses, academic institutions and private correspondence, and those recipients of electronic messages are being inundated with messages because of the increased popularity of electronic messaging and the migration to that medium from other messaging media, such as telephone calls, telegrams, physical (postal) mail, newspapers and magazines. This increase is, in part, due to the ease of access, the low cost of electronic exchange and because electronic messaging can be sent asynchronously and received quickly. While this medium allows for large amounts of information exchange, providing quick, relevant, and consistent responses to messages becomes increasingly difficult as the number of messages increases.
To alleviate these problems, some automated response systems have been proposed, with only limited success. In general, an automated response system processes an input message, attempts to "understand" what the writer is saying in the message, formulates an appropriate response and routes that response to the sender. Since many of the input messages are free-form text, a natural language processor and reasoning system is often used to "understand" what the input message is conveying, i.e., the intent of the sender. The term "understand" means the identification of information which corresponds to analogous situations previously identified by humans.
A typical message understanding system identifies words and other patterns in text, combining algorithmic and empirical methods to draw comparisons to known situations. Once the message is understood, a text generation system might be used to generate the response message text so that the entire communication response process is automated. The message understanding system might also include a classifier which understands the content of a message and routes or categorizes the message based on its content.
A number of approaches have been developed for automating text understanding and response. One approach to text understanding is to codify rules of natural language grammar. This approach is problematic because the rules of grammar are complicated, as well as incomplete, so systems based on them are difficult to produce and maintain. Another approach is to use statistical analysis of words within a text corpus, as is used in neural networks. Statistical analysis systems have the advantage that they are less difficult to maintain, but have the disadvantage that they are of limited usefulness where large amounts of relevant training data are not available.
Another approach to the problem of text understanding is to constrain and simplify the input message text. One way to do this is to have the writer of the input text use forms with limited choices and constrained syntax. Computer languages, with rigid and constrained syntax, are examples of how a user can communicate precisely with computers. While this approach greatly reduces the complexity of the process of automatic interpretation, it also requires prolonged, specialized user training.
Whether the messages are constrained or free-form, a message response system must first understand the input message text before it can process and respond to the message. One way to simplify the understanding and response process is to require manual intervention. The manual intervention approach has a number of drawbacks, since the process takes time and labor, requires training for reviewers and might result in inconsistency in responses from different reviewers. A manual review process might have the reviewer read a message and input a set of keywords, a classification, and/or a response. One approach to automating the manual process is to extract keywords from the input message and use them to compose a template response text. The drawback to this approach is that the keywords are chosen indiscriminately and are possibly irrelevant to the central intent of the input message text.
A problem with all the foregoing systems, with the exception of some applications of neural networks, is that system maintenance requires many of the same specialized skills required for original application development. Neural network systems can avoid that requirement, but they are limited to environments having a considerable amount of training data, a requirement which increases commensurately with the desired precision of classification. These systems classify without respect to meaning, i.e., irrelevant words are ineffectively separated from those central to intentionality.
Therefore, what is needed is a set of tools in a message text understanding and response system which reduces the requirement for specialized skills to produce and maintain domain specific applications.